Well, the end is here. Version 2, is no more. Honestly, I say good riddance, but others think other things about this program that we all use. Let's remember the things that we'll miss: the crashes, the constant lag, the horribly low resolution card art. Of course, the new interface leaves something to be desired as well. At any rate I was actually able to participate in the last Premier Event ever on Magic Online. More on that later though.

The last Standard Premier Event

Again this week we had no replays, and I wasn't able to get any meta at all for most of the Premier Events. However, there was one event that I especially wanted to get the statistics on. This one happened at 9PM Pacific Time in the US, and I got a lot of information the old-fashioned way. Here's the breakdown of the decks:

Colors

Deck Name

Placings

Percentage

Reveillark

16%

Elves

16%

Big Mana

12%

Faeries

12%

Crusher Deck Wins

12%

Merfolk

6%

White Weenie

4%

Knoll Storm

4%

Doran

2%

Other

6%

Unknown

6%

As you can see, the meta is surprisingly balanced throughout the whole PE. I'm happy with this because it means that there is at least some amount of balance in standard at the moment. You can pick up any of the top tier decks - Reveillark, Elves, Faeries, Big Mana, Crusher - and expect to have at least a reasonable chance to win. Elves has regained it's popularity throne, but I don't expect that it will be held that long by any deck in the coming standard.

The top two deck archetypes were two Reveillark decks, two Faeries decks, two Big Mana decks, a Doran and a Elves. Big Mana and Reveillark ended up splitting the finals. I have to give a big congratulations to haoduoren and monkeywrenched85 which piloted these decks to the final tables. Your glory will be written in history forever.. or at least until v3 comes up and we get our Premier Events back.

The color breakdown was also pretty balanced, although white is still lagging behind the other colors, and blue is unsurprisingly at the top. Here's how it looks:

White

Green

Red

Black

Blue

28.9%

35.6%

35.6%

35.6%

44.4%

Green, Red, and Black all have dead-even amounts of usage in the decks in at least this Premier Event, showing that there are viable decks in almost any color that you want to actually play. You have a lot of flexibility with your choices for decks.

I'm also happy to see that a lot of these decks aren't in the stratosphere for costs anymore. The cost of the Faeries deck is the most prohibitive, with most builds clocking in at $300 or more, but the rest of the field is relatively cheap comparatively. You could make Merfolk for less than $150, and anything that doesn't run Mutavault will be $100 cheaper than anything that does.

There are two White Weenie decks this week, which I found pretty interesting. I was lucky enough to get a list from one of the players, sandydogmtg, who developed the deck with frankenberry22.

The last Premier Event Ever

Okay, so it's not the last Premier Event ever, but it is the last Premier Event on version 2. I was planning on playing in the Premier Event that I just covered, but I noticed something popup soon after I joined up which I just couldn't pass up, and that was the final PE. It was unfortunately Sealed (Lorwyn-Morningtide-Morningtide) so I wasn't really going to use any of my Standard prowess here. I waited patiently, working on bugging everyone in the Standard PE about their decks, before I cracked open my pool:

This pool isn't bad at all - at least I didn't think it was bad when I started. There are three rares in white that are all playable in my opinion, and I could probably splash almost any other color I want because of the two vivid lands which are available. I was kind of sad to not see a Ballyrush Banneret in the white to make it even more crazy. Here's the deck that I ended up building:

Did I make the right choices with this deck? Only the test of the event will tell me. I was in for six rounds of precocious pairing with players playing for prizes... perfect. I ended up playing to a x-x record, proving that the deck had what it takes. This being my first limited Event in a while, I was as surprised as you were.

Round 1, I was paired against a blue-black deck which had some faeries and some removal. I got near to curving out with Woodland Changeling, Kinsbaile Skirmisher, and Ambassador Oak, but my opponent answered with Moonglove Changeling. Having tapped out for the deadly dark blob, I alpha strike in order to get rid of some life points. He has a Dewdrop Spy which puts blocking back into his favor slightly. Springjack Knight and Order of the Golden Cricket have something to say about that, coming down from my hand onto the board to help. Eventually they show their secret weapon: a splash of red in the form of Lash Out. It didn't prove enough to take down my army, which was supplemented by Changeling Titan soon enough. Game 2 I did okay, but my opponent drew the nuts, and we went to game 3, where I just couldn't get there.

The rest of the event was much nicer on me, with me "comboing out" once - turn 3 Preeminent Captain into turn 4 Changeling Titan. However, I ended up winning the next 4 rounds. Unfortunately my fate was based on someone else's game, who got paired down. If they lost, I might have to play round 6. As it was 4 AM at this point, I wasn't looking forward to another round. Unfortunately my tiebreakers were the worse of all of the 4-1s so I needed to play the final round. This was bad news because I was paired against a really good player with a deck which was crazy. His deck contained Obsidian Battle-Axe, Shriekmaw, Violet Pall, Nath's Elite and Mulldrifter to name a few, which causes a bit of a problem for my deck. I ended up 4-2, placed 9th, one spot out of the top 8. Of course, I spend 5 hours finding that out. At least I raised my Limited rating up above 1600.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about next week, with a whole week of darkness ahead of us. I'll probably put the second half of the deck-o-pedia together, showing off the decks that are actually still viable, but aren't being played that much. White Weenie would probably fit into that one. Until next week, good luck finding something to do instead of PEs!

This pool isn't bad at all - at least I didn't think it was bad when I started. There are three rares in white that are all playable in my opinion, and I could probably splash almost any other color I want because of the two vivid lands which are available. Thanks for posting such a useful article. Paid to click is an online business model that draws online traffic aiming to earn money from home.